A Totally HomeGrown Meal in Early May

The other night, we had Smoked Ham with Garden Potatoes and Carrots from last year!

I thought I would post these pictures to show you that we are Still eating out of our last years Garden.

Because we have a Cold Room down in the basement, where we can keep the temperatures between 32 and 40F, we can store all kinds of veggies down there.

These potatoes and carrots were put into the Cold Room last September. Eight months ago we pulled these veggies from our garden and moved them downstairs.

We leave the dirt on them and actually bury the carrots in buckets of garden dirt.

Here's Dinner....totally HomeGrown using vegetables harvested eight months ago and tasting as fresh as the day they were harvested. The Homegrown Ham is from our Pigs.

Do you have a Cold Room? Or a room that could be turned into a Cold Room? It's not hard to do, it just needs venting. If you have a window in that room, that can be your vent.

Find a spot in your home that you can use as a Cold Room and then get your Garden planted. You will be able to enjoy your veggies all Winter long!

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How Long Did A Box of Fresh Apples Last?

Last October, we were given a box of nice fresh apples, perhaps MacIntosh?

We put them in the cold room and enjoyed fresh apples right up until we left for Vacation in mid-January.

Now that we're back at home and grocery shopping downstairs again, I noticed the apples are

finally starting to dry out noticeably.

Now, if we didn't have a pantry full of applesauce and freezer doors lined with sliced apples for

pies, I'd do either with these apples. But we really don't need more. Really. We. Don't.

I quartered them and then halved them again and  added some water to the pan.

Since the woodstove is going all day and night, the apples will become sauce in no time.

Free Heat!  Free Apples!

These chickens love applesauce. Funny, they definitely like their apples cooked, they don't like them raw.

The point of this post is twofold.

First, if you can provide free but good food for yourself or your animals, that is a very good thing!

Second, notice how long that box of apples lasted? Put in the cold room in October, held at temperatures between 32 and 40F - these apples could be eaten fresh almost all Winter long.

How much are you paying for apples in the store? Are there wild Apple trees growing near where you live? Do you have a neighbour with fruit trees, but doesn't do anything with the fruit? (You'll want to know if they spray their fruit trees.)

You may already know that fruit hanging on trees and not used, entice bears by the wonderful smell of ripe and rotting fruit. Picking fruit from trees is a necessity around here.

If you can, put a box of apples in your cold room this Fall. Come January, you'll still be eating out of that box of apples....if there are any left.

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Storing Carrots for the Winter

 Did you plant lots of carrots this year, like we did? We Luvs us some carrots!

 Not only do we grow lots for ourselves, but we also grow them for our piggies,

who love them maybe even more than we do!

For info on how we grow carrots here, check this out....

Here's part of our carrot harvest from a couple of years ago. We had even more this year.

Since we are NOT fans of canned carrots, we don't bother canning any.

We're not really fans of frozen carrots either, we like ours fresh.

Now if you have lots and lots of carrots you could even make....

carrot wine!

We are trying this for the first time this year.

We'll let you know how that goes!

But here's the best way we have found to store our carrot bounty....

Get yourself a plastic 5 gallon bucket or box...

put a bit of garden dirt or sand in the bottom. Next, add a layer of carrots.

Then add another layer of garden dirt on top, enough so that you can't see the carrots.

Then put in another row of carrots....

Keep alternating like this until your bucket or box is full.

And.....that's it!

Just put the bucket in your cold room

or down in your cool basement.

Or if you live in more moderate climate, you could keep them

in your unheated garage.

(Altho really you could probably get away with just leaving them

in the garden and digging them up as needed over winter.)

When we store our carrots like this, they are AS SWEET in January

as they are when we dig them out of the soil in October....seriously!

So give this a try and you should have fresh carrots at your fingertips

until well into next Spring!

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